


You Are Nothing But A Weapon

by Sylviavolk2000



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alchemy, And also angst, Case Fic, Fallen Angels, I Don't Even Know, Kidnapping, Other, Other: See Story Notes, as in the same amount of subtext as in canon, lots of subtext, trigger warnings i guess
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-07-21 01:16:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16149491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sylviavolk2000/pseuds/Sylviavolk2000
Summary: Mary Winchester thought it was just a spontaneous combustion case, but when her sons come in to help, Dean is snatched and Sam and Castiel end up facing down other hunters as they try desperately to save him.Set during season twelve.





	1. A pillar of fire

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a dunce at trigger warnings, but anyway: approximately the same level of violence, innuendo, dubcon, subtext, our heroes being tied to beds and suggestively threatened, etcetera, etcetera, as in canon. (No torture though.) So if you're okay watching the show itself, you're probably good to read this.
> 
> Also, burning bodies. Because that's what happens when the Winchesters work a spontaneous combustion case.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spontaneously combusting exotic dancers.

Mary Winchester had been poking gently around small-town newspaper websites, just wondering if they'd be a good way to find cases, and came across the first nibble of a hint at maybe a mystery. Just a nibble. Two women dead by fire in the Pine Barrens, New Jersey. Another two in Trenton, and a fifth in Cape May. All close to Philadelphia and Atlantic City, close enough to be just plain old normal crime or accident, and of course women died in America every day in all sorts of ways, nothing supernatural about it. Mary only looked again because the obituaries had been so … short.

Barely any details. It made her curious.  No mention of what the dead women did for a living. Why?

Four different ME offices had handled the bodies. Just unexplained house fires, all five verdicts.

The police had barely taken any notice.

Five suicides through fire, that was what it looked like to Mary, and maybe the police had thought so too and been diplomatic about it. Those short obits, they sounded like what a horrified family wrote after a suicide. When you read enough obits you got a feeling for the way that grieving survivors glossed over bad things.

This was the twenty-first century, though. Mary started googling names and clicking through Facebook pages. Right off, she found out what some of the women worked at. Exotic dancing, yes. Way better money than Biggerson's, one had posted outright on her Facebook page. Another had a blog: Nothing to Hide, Meditations on Life in the Trade. She had had two published books and hundreds of followers. Mary was astonished, and then she laughed.

She liked the twenty-first century.

She kept poking. All five had danced at strip clubs. That was enough to make a pattern. And deaths by fire … she found more. All within reach of the Pine Barrens, across which a teenage Mary Winchester had hunted a murder of ravens, long ago. More women, some men, not all exotic dancers (as far as she could tell). Within the space of a decade, over thirty deaths by fire which were somehow not like accidents, not like murder either: so they'd been ruled suicide, and forgotten.

It had been decades since Mary had hunted in the small towns of the Pine Barrens. So she felt safe about going back; she wouldn't be recognized. She ironed her power suit and checked her FBI badge.

The latest victim was still in lying in a morgue. Mary talked her way in and looked at the body. Just a burned body, not much left to it … until she read the autopsy report.

Its heart had been missing.

She had a case.

  
#

  
She visited the families of the victims.

"Stacey was putting herself through school," Stacey's mother told her, sitting very upright and dignified. "Not an easy thing for a single mom to do. She couldn't get any other work that paid her right, nobody would hire her for good hours, and the price of university? She didn't have any choice. But she was bound and determined she'd be an accountant. Accountants make good money, Stacey told me, she did, she said she'd make sure none of us ever went hungry, she said." She blotted her eyes with a Kleenex.

"You loved her very much," Mary said.

"I sure did. And I forgive her." She looked down. "For killing herself. I do. She was always my good smart girl."

At the second victim's sister's house: "Ambrosia? Oh, you read her blog. Yeah, she worked all ends of the sex trade, here, down in New Mexico, she went to Amsterdam for a year too, all over, and she wrote about it all the time … What? No. No, nothing strange happened around the time she … Why? I didn't know she'd started smoking but she must have, she just didn't tell anyone. Smoking in bed. Never mind, she's in heaven now. I hope she looks down on us and smiles." Mary knew that wasn't likely, but she held her tongue. "Kids? Yeah, two. They're in Abilene with their dad. Ambrosia had such a big heart."

_Not any longer_ , Mary thought.

The third victim had lived with a boyfriend. "Yes, of course I knew she stripped--that's how we met. It paid better than waitressing. She DJed in Atlantic City, when she could get a gig. I think another year or so and I'd have been able to talk her into retiring." With air-quotes, and a faint smile that had gone away almost at once. The boyfriend looked at nothing, chewing his lip. He said, "You know, nobody really knows what other people have in their hearts, not really. It broke mine when she killed herself. But if it wasn't suicide, if it was murder? That would be worse. Like someone threw her away like a bagful of trash."

  
#

  
The thing was that Mary had never worked a spontaneous combustion case before. It must have flown under the radar for other Campbells too, because she didn't remember any of them talking about it as if it was a thing. She'd thought, whenever she ran across mentions in compendiums of the weird, that actual spontaneous combustion was just a myth. Like Bigfoot, not real. (She should remember to ask some modern hunters if sasquatches were still not real.)

She sat in a roadside diner, ordered the Sunshine Sausage Special, and cast her mind back over her education.

Her father had started her on the lore as soon as she could read. It was one of her first memories. Little chubby Mary in her Dorothy braids and a polkadot Sunday dress, with a bracelet of pink plastic flowers around her wrist, sitting in the den reading a book practically bigger than she was. She'd dropped the book by accident and nearly died at the bang it raised. Mom and Pops had come running, but all Pops had said was, "A Campbell doesn't fear the night, Mary. Because a Campbell knows how to fight what's out there."

She'd been so mad at him. Like a cat with its fur rubbed wrong. She hadn't spoken to him for days.

Pushed by him, studying, years and years learning her way through the immense library of Campbell lore, with Pops smiling down proudly at her bent head. He'd tested her as if for holy catechism. To a Campbell, hunting was just like belonging to a cult. It was religion.

But none of her family's journals mentioned spontaneous human combustion.

The missing heart angle, combined with it--that puzzled her. She knew, what, fourteen?--yes, fourteen kinds of monsters that took hearts. She ran down the list in her head as she ate her hash browns. When she'd first memorized that list, her mother Deanna had helped her by setting it to a tune they could sing together. That wasn't helpful now. Her mental list of monsters that had been known to burn their victims was even longer. But she didn't recall lore about anything doing burning and heart-theft in combination.

Of course she knew somewhere that had _all_ the lore.

This could be demonic. She didn't know demons the way she knew, for instance, werewolves; demon sightings had been so rare in her day, a Campbell could hunt lifelong and never come across one - even rarer than vampires. She wasn't experienced, but again, she knew where to go for demon expertise ... Same place, too. Damn. Mary pushed her half-full plate away and contemplated her Iphone. Finally she used it.

Her son Dean's number picked up on the third ring. What she heard next was a shout of laughter through the connection. It sounded so carefree that she was jolted into a smile--what had she interrupted? Next a voice said, still breathless with laughter, "Dean Winchester sex desperation hotline, no call left unanswered--" and then the sound of a scuffle. The phone on the other end apparently bounced out of someone's hold and hit a hard surface, maybe a table. She thought she heard a chair overturn too. Then several thumps, and a gasp of triumph.

"Dean can't come to the phone," her son Sam's voice said. "Too old and slow. Sorry."

"Give me my phone back!" another voice howled.

"Sam, Dean," Mary said, still smiling. The irrational dread she'd been feeling had gone away, poof, as it always did when she phoned her sons. Now she just wanted to laugh too.

"Am I on speaker?"

"Hi Mom," Sam said.

"Give me the phone!"

"You snooze you lose, Dean. How's things going, Mom? You doing okay?"

There were more scuffling noises.

"You boys play nice," Mary ordered. "Listen, I'm working a spontaneous combustion case--"

"Really? Spontaneous human combustion?" her sons said, in chorus.

"--Yes, and I don't have any lore on it. I'd have put it down as ghost activity but the locations are too widely scattered. Not ghost-typical and no sign of a tether. It just doesn't feel like a ghost," Mary said, sighing. "And get this. The hearts are missing. Have you ever hunted anything did that?"

She munched a slice of bacon while she waited for their answer.

"Are the eyes burned out, Mom?"

"No. It's not angel work. More like their hearts … exploded from the inside."

"Never heard of that before," Dean said, finally. "What else you got?"

"Well, I was hoping you could do some looking in that big library of yours. I don't have much more."

"We're not at the bunker, we're on the road. Mermaid job."

"Mermaids, huh. So no Men of Letters library handy." Damn.

"I have over ninety meg OCRed and uploaded to the cloud," said her son Sam, and she had no idea what that meant, but she supposed it was intended to be encouraging. "And we have Bobby's library and all, but I don't know, spontaneous combustion. That's pretty crazy."

"Yeah, tell me? So, yes, so far I'm still betting ghost, but only because the whole thing is just so odd. I'm in the Pine Barrens."

"Mom, we're practically next door! Nantucket. We're just cleaning up after the mermaids--"

"We sushied those suckers," Dean's voice said.

"--we can be there by tomorrow, want some help? We can help you hit the local library."

"I'm doing okay. I usually hunt by myself."

"It's not safe to hunt solo, Mom."

"I know what I'm doing, Sam."

There was a silence. Inwardly, Mary cursed. She went on hastily, "I really usually just … I haven't hunted with a partner since my dad died. It's not a local library kind of case anyway. And you've got your own work. The only other solid thing I've got is all the victims are, sorry, were exotic dancers, and the local records are hardly going to help with that."

Both her sons answered instantly, voices tumbling over each other.

Sam: "But we want to! We'd be happy to help."

And Dean: "Spontaneously combusting strippers? You've got spontaneously combusting strippers?? Mom! We're on our way."

  
#

  
Mary kept finding more victims.

She put up a map, and began pinning names to it. She covered two walls of her hotel room, which was decorated everywhere with pine trees, every lampshade, the bedspread, the curtains. Even the complementary scratchpad on the night-table. Considering that the wallpaper was also pine-themed, reducing the amount of deep forest ambiance was a blessing even if she had to cover it with murder statistics.

No more exotic dancers, but she found several homeless people who'd inexplicably burned to death. Hookers all over the state too, including several in Philadelphia. And no, wait, she put in a pin for another stripper. She'd missed him the first time round because she'd only been looking for women. But it was all the same m.o.

This last victim was recent, just two and a half months ago. In Cape May, like one of the other strippers. Different club, though. Mary contemplated the name of the club in question: Beard Burn. Beard Burn … wow. The Beard Burn All-Male Revue Strip Club.

Sounded grungy. No way she could pull off an inconspicuous visit to a gay strip club for men. She'd stick out like a sore thumb. The problem was, though, a lone woman her age would stick out like a sore thumb at any strip club whatever. At the very least she needed a male companion. Maybe she should go undercover? She could claim to be looking for kitchen work. Not an option she wanted to take, though--not with the way she felt about cooking.

Still, if her sons insisted on joining in, she could send them trolling through strip clubs in her place.

She always shifted hotels after just two nights, no matter how safe she felt. (Hunters weren't paranoid, the world really was out to get them, as her father always said.) Right now she was in Atlantic City, off the turnpike, on the motel strip. It had the cheapest prices in all NJ. She could stay one night longer before decamping for someplace (hopefully) less pine-themed. Mary looked at her room walls, covered with notes and cross-referenced maps. If the boys were coming, she had an errand she wanted to run first, and she had just enough time to do it.

She hopped in her car and drove north toward Long Beach. As soon as she could, though, she took a back road, and then turned off that onto an old track, just one of the mazy dozens of informal roads that crisscrossed the barrens, some old, some new. There were dozens of ghost towns there too, eaten up by woodland with barely anything to show they'd ever existed, except the roads that led to where they'd once been. The Pine Barrens. More ghost towns than anywhere east of the gold-rush. Eventually she came out of the woodland and turned back onto a paved road, and pulled in at a storage facility.

There'd been a Campbell storage locker here. The Campbell clan had similar lockers dotted all over the eastern states. These were emergency boltholes, with weapon stashes and lore-books. Campbell hunters would sleep rough in them sometimes, behind salt lines and triple layers of warding. When you didn't have a safe cabin within reach, a storage locker was better than nothing; besides the clan often preferred to move hidden, leaving no trace, not even motel registration under false names. Invisible to the world. The Campbells had been organized about it. But that had been decades ago.

Her sons had told her what had become of the Campbells, in their time. She half expected this locker to be gone, lock pry-barred open and all contents auctioned off, as with the weird reality shows she'd seen on modern television. And my goodness, wouldn't a storage-locker buyer be flabbergasted by the mysteries of a Campbell lore-and-ammo dump …

But it was worth checking anyway.

She was still vaguely astonished when she walked down the row of doors, and found one whose padlock had been roughly chiseled with sigils. Yes, those were hunter marks and warding signs. They were lightly-cut enough to be inconspicuous, but they'd keep out all kinds of monsters. The method was familiar to her. Mary picked the lock and pulled the door up, wincing at its loud creak. She stepped inside the dark locker.

She expected a shroud of dust, tins of food bloated with age, gasoline cans sitting empty maybe, and whatever lore-books and weapons had been stored there would surely be chewed by insects and rust. Even if the locker hadn't been opened and emptied, it'd been left alone for years now. But she stopped short, looking around, disbelieving.

The concrete floor had been swept. Recently. In the beam of her flashlight she saw intact salt lines, intact sigils painted on the walls; she smelled gun oil. There was a tiny microwave and a space heater, rigged up to run off some kind of battery power unit. A pair of cots stowed upright and folded, rolled sleeping bags and several duffels. A lidded plastic tub with FIRST AID written across it in felt marker. Stacks of other sturdy tubs. And Ikea shelving units across one entire wall, with row after row of books.

  
#

  
Two hours later, she pulled up at an Atlantic City roadhouse. She hadn't been here before. Night would come soon; the neon sign was already blinking brighter as the sky darkened, and cars thronged the parking lot. Music and laughter and loud voices spilled out when a couple crossed ahead of Mary and pushed through the doors.

She didn't go in immediately. Head down, hands cupping her elbows, she let herself delay. Pushed at a rock on the pavement of the parking lot. And cursed herself for cowardice. Sam and Dean had probably already arrived, were waiting for her inside. The moment they saw her, they'd be right there, faces shining with happiness to be with her again. Her boys.

Her little boys, grown in an eyeblink from towheaded darlings to two giant strangers bristling with weaponry, and she was younger than them now--physically younger, though the face she looked at in the mirror these days was haggard and tired, older than her age. (And she was glad of it--how crazy was that?) Her four-year-old Dean had been sunshine all day long. He couldn't bounce through a room without lifting her heart, she hadn't been able to stop smiling in his presence, and he'd hugged her around the legs a dozen times an hour. And her baby Sam ...

She had damned Sam, left him destroyed in the cradle, his whole existence a curse, and someday she'd burn for it. How she'd ever got into to heaven was beyond her. Such a mistake. She belonged in hell. The hunting life destroyed everyone who lived it, they doomed themselves trying to do good in the world, and there was no reward for them, ever.

She thought: _I was brought back so I could find a way to save them._

She pinned a smile on her face, and stepped inside to find her boys.

  
#

  
They'd made better time than Sam expected, but then Dean had floored it most of the way. That was funny in a way. They hadn't hunted in the Pine Barrens since Bobby's death--they'd been avoiding the place--but that didn't matter now. It had all washed away when they heard Mom was here. They were both eager to help Mom.

Sam had been rereading the same screen on his laptop for half an hour now without taking in the words. He ate a bite of kale. Good and crisp. They'd picked the Crazy Cowboy as a good place to meet mostly because of the food; time was, you could order anything here and it would be, shockingly, good. He drummed on the tabletop with one finger, then made himself stop, and scrolled downward. Monsters that used fire. Fire hounds, firecats, Thule necromancers, witches with pyromania, will o' the wisps, dragons … He couldn't concentrate.

Dean's voice floated to him, gravel-low under the general hubbub, "I killed Hitler."

Sam grinned to himself. All his brother had to do was show up in a public place and there would be girls, that much was just Dean, but it took a special talent to turn up hunter girls. Hunter women, actually, and not one but three. Two sisters and an older cousin, all raised in the life from what they said, all three in leather jackets and baggy combat pants: tough blonde women with sexy swaggers and callused trigger fingers. They'd made Dean and Sam right off, and swooped Dean off to sit with them at the bar.

They'd been trading hunting stories, but now two of them broke down laughing. The third wore a cowboy hat, a grin from ear to ear, and a bright skeptical look. "Hitler? Riiight."

Nobody else in the crowd seemed to be paying attention. Well, it was a pretty loud place. Dean said, "No, really. Nazi necromancers--"

The women straightened. "Order of Thule?"

"You know 'em? Yeah, those jokers. Crazy blood magic, bringing back the dead, big plans. Takin' over the world. _Nazi necromancers._ I killed Hitler."

The women contemplated him. Cowboy Hat slid her barstool closer and said, "You're going home with me, darling."

Sam watched his big brother swallow, glance at his watch, and (probably) calculate how much time he had before Mom showed up. _Not long enough,_ Sam thought. _Ha._ He wanted to see how Dean talked his way out of this one, but all Dean did was put his mouth to Cowboy Hat's ear and murmur. She crowed out loud and clasped her hands around his arm, and said something Sam didn't catch to the others.

Her sister held up a stopwatch, and clicked it.

Sam looked away fast, not willing to let Dean catch his eye and smirk triumphantly as Cowboy Hat hustled him away toward the rear of the roadhouse, out to the alley, or the bathrooms maybe, or the staff closet or somewhere.

Of course it would be approximately one minute later that Mom walked in.

Sam waved, amused. When she was close enough he said, "Hi, Mom. Dean's just stepped out to do something real quick."

Mom smiled and slid into the other side of the booth. "Why are you laughing like that?"

"Long story. You should get something, the food here's great. I got the files you sent us."

She ordered beer and a steak. By the time her beer arrived, she and Sam were both deep into her casefile on the laptop, discussing them. "It's definitely not angels," Sam said. "But it goes way back, before we were born. The burned bodies." He thought, suddenly, of bodies burning on ceilings, and he sneaked a quick guilty look at her, but she was only scrolling down the current file and frowning in concentration at its list of names. He said, "But that Beard Burn place, that's not a gay club. It's for women. You'd be perfectly fine going in there alone."

"Huh."

"Yeah. It's me and Dean who'd stick out. Though we could go undercover as dancers," Sam said, and she laughed.

"Dean hasn't come back," she said a few minutes later.

Sam was a little irritated by Dean. "The heart thing is probably the key, if only we could figure out how." He glanced at the bar. The remaining two hunter women there had been fidgeting for a while, eyeing the stopwatch as it lay on the bar counter and ticked. The older cousin had her hand on the younger sister's arm, talking into her ear. Finally they both stood up. The stopwatch got scooped up and stowed away. They threw down some cash and headed for the back.

They paused by Sam's booth. "Just gonna catch some air," the older one said.

Sam said, "They probably just got caught up in the moment."

"Yeah. But." A shrug. "We worry. Deedee's been a while. Who's this?"

"Uh, my mom. Mary."

"I'm Flo, and this is Christina. Nice t'meet you." They headed off.

Sam came to a decision. He folded his laptop. "Mom. I'm just going outside for a moment."

"I'm coming too."

Sam headed for the front. He'd look around the parking lot there, and swing by to meet Flo and Christina in the back. Then he heard screaming. He started to run.

Mom was on his heels, racing, as he burst out of the roadhouse.

In the parking lot, among work trucks and muddy jeeps, a fire burned. A pillar of fire. In it, a woman--Cowboy Hat aka Deedee, who'd gone off with Dean so cheerful and laughing--stood screaming, and then she toppled backwards with a flail of fiery arms. Burning. Burning, so she struck the pavement in a shower of sparks. As she did, her right arm shattered at the elbow, reduced to black charcoal. The pieces of it bounced and scattered.

She was still burning. Sam knew she was already dead, he knew it, but he kept running toward her. Maybe he could still help. He saw Dean coming in a charge from the opposite direction--from the direction of the Impala--knife in hand, at a dead run straight for the fire. For the monster, while Sam had run instinctively toward the victim. The fire had lifted upward, drifting slightly to the left, concentrated into a disc of rayed light too brilliant for details. Blue and blazing light.

The light hovered, while the blackened corpse on the pavement broke apart, burning. Something rolled out of the corpse's ribcage, a tiny brilliant sparkle. It caught the blue light and blazed with refraction. It looked like a gemstone.

Then Dean reached the light.

He stabbed it with Ruby's knife. _So he's putting his money on demons_ , Sam thought nonsensically. The blade of the demon knife went straight through the light, and the light was left untouched. Sam was still running toward them.

All the rays of light swung around and blazed upon Dean. Through the dazzle Sam saw Dean, snarling, cut a salt shell open and wave it, salt spraying out in a wide arc.

A voice said, "Q M O N O N U S A I A C H I L D A O D E I Z I Z O P." All time seemed to halt while it spoke. The light flared blindingly, and snuffed out.

Sam skidded to a stop, bent over the woman's corpse, the black rubble. In a broad circle, everything around him was foul with soot and scorch-marks and a greasy dark fatty substance, and the smell took him back to every body he'd ever burned--ghost-bones and dead hunters and dead monsters and demon-possession victims--all at once. The stench of burning meat.

The Cage. Lucifer, laughing in the Cage, with cold fire flickering over him, and Sam's own flesh burning upon his bones. Sam turned aside and vomited over the scorched front grill of a SUV.

"Dean?" said his mother's voice, from behind him.

Dean and the light were both gone.


	2. Stolen

  
_It stole Dean._

It had been angelic light. Sam was sure of it--that blue radiance, that exact heavenly shade of blue. Before the last licks of fire had died down, he was on his cell, calling Castiel. As he ended the call he looked around; Mom was crouching over the corpse, staring down. Sam said, "This is some kind of angel kill. I don't know what kind, but it is. Castiel's on his way."

He realized with a jolt that his mouth tasted like bile--like a barroom floor, morning after a rough night--and wiped it, swallowing. Cas was up north, in Albany. It'd take him at least twenty-four hours to reach Atlantic City.

"How do you know?" Mom sniffed a little soot on the tip of her finger. "That it's an angel kill."

"The color of that light. It took Dean. It didn't, uhh, didn't kill him, it flew with him. Took him somewhere."

"Are you sure, Sam?"

"It teleported with him," Sam insisted. Kidnapped him, captured him, who knew why, Sam had never had pretensions toward understanding angels--and maybe Cas could help figure out why a rogue angel was torching humans--but why didn't matter, not as much as what it had done--

_It stole Dean!_

Mom straightened; she was unaffected by the burned body. Maybe she didn't associate it with her own death. Of course she hadn't spent eighteen years living with an obsessed John Winchester, whose entire existence was a memorial to burning bodies. Mom said, "Didn't they all lose their wings?" Then, "Not that I'm any kind of expert on angels." Then, "Watch out, here comes--"

The other two hunters came at a run, pulling up when they spotted the circle of burnt remains. Sam got between them and it, his hand held up to keep them from looking. "Wait. Something's happened."

They were already looking, though. "What is that, is it your case? Another victim?"

"Yes, but--"

"Ugh. Nasty. Wait, what's that?" The younger one, Christina, drew a bowie knife and used it to fish something carefully out of the remains. "Sparkly." She picked it up and scrubbed it clean, then held it up. "From a ring maybe? Looks like cubic zirconia."

Flo, though, was staring at Sam. Probably at his expression. She looked at him, flicked a glance at the ground, looked at Sam, went pale. "You're not saying …"

"I'm sorry," Sam said.

Christina recoiled so suddenly that she staggered, her face sickened. The gemstone fell from her hand and lay sparkling brilliantly on the pavement.

#

"Deedee was by herself in the parking lot when it, well," Sam said. "Then Dean came from the direction of our car. Maybe he was getting something from the trunk."

 _Maybe fresh clothes,_ Mary thought. Their duffels must still be in the Impala. She had a good idea why Dean and Deedee had gone off together.

Flo said, "She would have taken him back here, to our trailer. They had long enough for their fun." She looked down. "Our poor Deedee, at least she had a send-off." Christina, Deedee's younger sister, stood in the rear of the trailer, arms wrapped around herself and her back to everyone, and Mary knew she was crying but she didn't make a sound; she hadn't said a word since she'd learned Deedee was dead. It was a further tragedy, Mary supposed, that they couldn't hold a hunter's funeral. Deedee's body had already burned.

The trailer wasn't that big, but it was roomy enough for three cousins who didn't mind rubbing elbows. It had been in the roadhouse lot, but the hunter women had taken it to Mary's motel and parked it there, and moved all of Mary's research over, out of the Décor of The Pines. Now, Flo had cleared the little dinette table in the trailer, and spread out the paraphernalia of a spell.

She'd asked for something of Dean's. Sam had brought her a battered AC/DC cassette. "You have to promise you won't break it though," he'd said. "He'll kill me if you wreck it."

"I won't wreck it." Flo painted tiny sigils across a sheet of paper, and wrapped the cassette in it. She kissed it, cut her thumb and began chanting in Latin. Mary recognised the spell. She whispered as much to Sam, who had been concentrating fiercely on every detail, and was glad when he relaxed. Flo rolled out a map of New Jersey, shut her eyes and stabbed her bloody thumb down on it.

The paper of the map crackled busily. The blood soaked into it in swift spidery lines, running every which way. Dozens of thin lines. Some of them branched. Others ended, and began to go transparent, ebbing back on themselves. The red lines surged back and forth across the width of the map, almost covering it, dying away, bursting out afresh … vanishing, vanishing. Ebbing back until only one point of fresh wet blood would remain … That would be where Dean was.

Flo and Mary and Sam bent low over the map. "Almost there, almost there," Flo crooned. "Almost there ..."

The paper crackled again. Flo said, "No!"

All the lines had vanished. Every trace of blood was gone.

The spell hadn't worked.

"Sometimes it fails," Flo said wearily. "We try again. Your boy could be in some other state. We'll try Pennsylvania next." She sat down, or rather slumped down onto the bench beside the table; her face looked gray. "Just let me rest a moment. I don't know how I'm going to tell Deedee's father … What are you-all hunting, anyway? What kind of monster is it?"

Mary met Sam's gaze; his jaw was out-thrust, his mouth downturned with anger. _Angel,_ he mouthed at her. She said, "Sam thinks it's an angel, and he knows angels. What about your group? What was your hunt?"

"Well, it wasn't an angel," Flo said grimly.

"Please don't say it's the Passaic hellgate."

"Hell no, pull the other one." But Flo had almost smiled; every hunter worth her salt knew about the Passaic County fake hellgate. "No, we were aiming to take a swing at the Route 55 woman in white."

"Oh, yeah." Mary nodded. Every hunter worth her salt--well, every one who worked the east coast, anyway--also knew about the New Jersey woman in white. Route 55, exit 52. Just an ordinary woman in white, except no matter how many times hunters put her down, she always popped back up again. In fact it had been almost a family ambition among the Campbells ... every Campbell wanted to be the one who finally got the Route 55 woman in white. Mary's pops had sworn he'd banished her. Half Mary's cousins, the same. They all eventually tried for that win. Mary hadn't, but she'd been meaning to do it, see if she could be the hunter who made it stick. But she'd been distracted by marriage and children, she supposed. It had seemed frivolous. In the end she hadn't bothered.

"Is that the Indian Curse Road woman in white?" Sam said. "Bobby Singer laid her to rest in 2011."

"I don't think so, boyo," Flo said ruefully.

Christina turned. One sweep of her fist, and the kerosene lamp hanging on a wall-peg crashed to the floor. Its glass smashing in a thousand pieces. Sam flinched; Mary found herself reaching for her gun. She stopped and forced her shoulders to relax. Christina's face looked twenty years older, tear-streaked, with deep hollows for eyes and her lips pulled back from clenched teeth. "Are we just going to fuck around here blabbing about tall tales and white women that aren't? Or are we gonna hunt and destroy the monster that killed my sister?"

Flo started, "Oh, sweetie--"

"And killed Sam's brother, don't forget that!" Christina jabbed a finger at Sam.

"Dean's not dead," Sam said, from between gritted teeth.

"'Course he is. I'm sorry but he is, that thing burned his heart away …" Christina's voice broke. Her fist was clenched, its knuckles stark white; she sobbed once, and opened her palm. A jewel was embedded in the heel of her hand. It had been driven into the skin so hard she bled.

Mary realized it was the sparkling thing that had fallen from Deedee's ashes. It was small but very bright, bright and clear as a wedding-ring diamond.

"Like it burned Deedee's heart up and this is all that's left!" Christina howled. "All I've got left of her!" Almost in a whisper: "She never wore jewelry." She doubled over, clutching the jewel to her chest, gasping out sobs, and Flo took her in her arms, cradling her while she wept. "She never wore jewelry."

 _So it wasn't from her wedding ring,_ Mary thought. _She wasn't married, maybe._

"Sweetie, now," Flo was saying. "We'll get that thing. We'll make it pay, you know we will."

"I'm gonna kill it! I'm gonna, I'm gonna kill it, I will. I am."

"And we're going to get Dean back," Sam said, not as loudly but with as much conviction. He moved into the center of the room. He stood taller than his normal habit, Mary noticed, a little surprised; it hadn't struck her before, but her younger son usually stooped, as if he wanted to make himself unintimidating. Her gentle son.

"He's dead," Christina said furiously. "Face it, he's dead."

"He's not dead. And we'll find him. We'll do it without you if we need to. Mom?"

Mary steeled herself. She made her voice quiet, moving between her son and the other two women. "Sam, calm down." She meant to go on, _You're scaring them, go slower, you'll get better results that way_ \--but at the look he gave her, the words stuck in her throat. She hesitated and then went on, "We have to be … professional, we have to plan. We won't get anywhere flying off half-cocked."

"But It's Dean," Sam said. He stood looking down at her, very close. Very tall.

"If we aren't thinking clearly, we won't hunt well." Pops had drummed that into her head a million times. "We'll miss clues. We might make mistakes. Sam, listen--"

"It's _Dean_ ," Sam repeated.

"Sam, listen to me!"

"We'll find him," Sam said, dead quiet and frightening--not her gentle son, but someone she didn't want to meet in a dark alley, ever.

He turned around and went out of the trailer, slamming the door as he did, and Mary jumped as it crashed shut.

 _I handled that badly_ , she thought.

Behind her, both of the other women exhaled. "Is that boy of yours always that intense?"

"I'm … he and Dean are close." Mary bowed her head. "I didn't really say before, but I'm sorry for your loss. It always seems doubly wrong to me when a hunter dies a victim. It's so senseless."

"Our kind don't expect to die in bed of old age," Flo said. She still had an arm around Christina's shoulders. Christina, huddled in on herself now, was looking at the diamond in her hands. "At least it was quick, came as a surprise--I think that's better."

"You never really said why you were out here."

"Kind of a holiday for we three. Deedee needed to kick up her heels a mite, party down. She'd been struggling. Broke up with her fiance. Wanted to have one last fling before she went home to marry the idiot and make kids for the clan." Flo made a face. "I know, I know, sounds stupid. Family stuff."

It didn't. It sounded familiar to Mary, instead. As familiar as childhood.

She stared at the two women. They'd never said their last names, but she knew. "You're Campbells," she said.

#

Sam stood outside, under the night sky and the impersonal lonely stars. He was so furious that it burned like ice through his veins.

 _Mom,_ he thought dismally.

Then, while fishing for his spare set of Impala keys--he carried one just as Dean did, in case of the unexpected--he thought: _wait._

_White women who aren't._

_That's what none of us spotted, in the trailer there, the detail that doesn't fit: a woman in white who Bobby dealt with, but who didn't stay banished. Apparently. A woman in white who isn't a woman in white._

_That's where to start._

#

Waking up tied to a kingsized bed in the middle of an orgy--it was just his luck, Dean thought, to get dropped into a porno and find himself the only guy who wasn't getting any.

Winchester luck.

It was a big old-fashioned bedroom, probably built at least seventy years previously from the look of the plain wooden beam walls. They'd been wallpapered once, there were still faint traces of it, striped green and white; the ceiling had been plastered in white too, with coffering and a design of laurel leaves, all fancy. Like in a mansion from the previous century. Gilding was faintly visible on the wreaths of leaves. Everything was very clean, lit by candles in a golden glow; he smelled good beeswax. All the windows were intact as far as Dean could see. This wasn't a squat or a murder basement or anything. It was someplace people lived in, a home they loved and cared for.

He couldn't actually spy on the orgy, it sounded like it was happening just outside in the hall and maybe all over the rest of the house, lots of happy noise. Life-affirming, really. He had just satisfied himself that the plastic zip-ties on his wrists and ankles were the bad kind, the kind that weren't easily bollixed, and was looking toward the half-open bedroom doors, when he heard a ruffle and there was someone sitting on the edge of the bed.

Dean froze. His pulse slowed--it always happened in the presence of danger--and he forgot all the unimportant details, narrowing his eyes, bracing the soles of his boots against the bedspread: showtime.

A woman sat there, her back to him. He could see the curve of her back, her graceful neck and her hair, all soft curls piled up atop her head; the light from the candles hazed it. She smelled like the air after a rainstorm with lightning.

She seemed lost in thought, until she turned very slightly and was smiling at him, saying, "You're a miracle." Then her hands were stroking his face, her kiss was soft on his forehead, all he smelled was sweet tempting femininity, and all he heard was her intoxicating voice: "You're amazing, you have no idea-- I have to have you. Say yes."


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Man, it's fun to write Dean's pov. Also, the plot thickens!

 

 

"You're an angel?" Dean said.

He lay glaring up and straining at the zip-ties that bound him to the bed. Being tied down was enough all by itself to make him boil, and he didn't know where Sam was or what she might have done to him, he didn't know about Mom either … and what about Deedee? This was the monster that had burned Deedee up, burned her to a crisp. He was very clear on that. So she looked all pretty and innocent? Screw that.

What he ought to give her was a hot angel-blade dipped in holy oil.

She said, "I'm a cupid."

"So what? Cuts you no slack with me, lady."

"But I heard you liked our kind," she murmured. "Heaven's kind. All sorts of stories--"

"You call all the numbers you read in truckstop bathrooms too? I don't care what you've heard."

"I've heard the gossip," she said, calmly. "On angel radio. They talk about you, Dean Winchester. And weren't you the chosen of heaven?"

"Heaven's chosen hand-puppet maybe. And I met a cupid or two before. None of 'em tied me up on a bed like they were going to eat me! Why should I like you?"

"I'm not going to eat you, don't worry." Her voice went soft with sudden laughter, a music that made him want to strain closer up to hear, even though he knew what she was. Her face was borrowed, maybe stolen, but still the shadow of her long eyelashes and the soft blush on her cheek, her dimpled smile--those things made him hot. Even though her body was like her face, borrowed. A vessel's gorgeous body, and the creature wearing it--the creature he was talking with--was not made of flesh.

You couldn't trust angels. Wavelengths of celestial bad intentions, they were. They saw human beings as tools to be used and discarded.

Dean knew that. He was the Michael Sword to them.

Castiel was the only good apple off _that_ tree.

She leaned in close, resting her vessel's forehead against his. Her hand slid up his chest, her sigh was warm on his cheek. She smelled of roses.

"I want you," she breathed.

"This isn’t even a half-good porno," Dean said. And as she straightened, eyebrows lifting, "Not that I'm complaining."

"But I do need your help." Another sigh. "Everyone here does, Dean."

He cocked an ear toward the noises beyond the door. "Don't sound to me like they do. Sounds like they're coping just fine. You sure this isn't … ?"

"A porn film? No, it's not."

"You know about porn? Wow. Five hundred percent more worldly than most of your kind, lady."

The cupid shrugged. "I ran away from heaven a long time ago," she said. "We're just cherubs, we cupids, the lowest of our kind. Always having to work down here in the muck. Even when Earth was forbidden to other angels, we cupids were here, laboring in heaven's name. If they ever sent one of the garrison angels down on a mission they mostly scrubbed their memories clean afterward, did you know that? To avoid soiling them with humanity." Her voice was very hard now. "But cupids? We don't get the good vessels, we don't get anything. They never think about us. We don't count."

"Cry me a river. I'd feel a pang maybe if I wasn't, you know, still tied to a bed! … But sure. Go on."

"It's fine if I tell you all my plans, though. You won't be making any difference. And I did run away. I've been living here for over two hundred years, here in the Pine Barrens. It's a good place and I have made it mine." She drew back, ruffling Dean's hair as she did, then stroked his forehead. "You won't blame me for it, I'm sure you won't, I'm just like your own friend. Castiel? The seraph. Famous Castiel. Much better than me--seraphs sneer at cupids, say they don't like the way we say hello. Well, look how things are up there now, thanks to them. At least we cupids, we can get our job done."

Dean lay listening, his lips clipped together tightly. Does she ever stop jawing? he wondered. And what did she think he was about to do here, lie back and sing a round of _Sweet Emotion_? Zip-ties were trouble but not impossible to get out of, that is if Her Grace let him have some alone time, and then out the window he'd go. He was beginning to be sure she didn't have Sam or Mom tied up too. If she hadn't mentioned it by now, it hadn't happened.

"... and I still have my bow," she concluded, serenely.

An angel blade dipped in holy oil, yeah. Right up her ass.

"What you gonna do with me, lady?"

"It's hard to believe a man like you could be linked to the divine." She was bending close again, almost close enough for a kiss. "But you are. I feel it, like a diamond in your heart." Her fingers stole down and twined themselves with Dean's, and her hair fell all across his face again. "You have to help us," she whispered, "you have to help all of us, we're all a family here, I gathered them all together, I found them runaway and lost and wandering alone on the roads of this earth, and now you have to save us. Every one, every man and woman and child in this house. They're my people. Please, please …"

"Please … what?"

"I need you to say yes to me."

Dean jerked violently sideways, away from her. "Son of a bitch _no!_ "

"You have to. If you don't, they'll all die. I can persuade you."

Another jerk away, so hard it wrenched his wrists where the ties bound him. Anything to put some distance between him and her hands, her warm body that was so much like a real woman's. When she stroked his brow again, he bucked and bared his teeth at her. She still leaned close with wide beseeching eyes, fingers hovering as if desperate to touch.

"I don't care about you," Dean growled.

She kissed him.

And kissed him.

He forgot to struggle. She bumped her nose against his, smiled soft against his cheek, tilted her head a tad to give him some proper mouth action and leaned her weight on him, opening his flannels, skimming his undershirt out of his pants and hiking it up across his chest. Somehow now she was unbuckling his belt and sliding around to get on top of him, but all the while her mouth never lifted from his, even when she sucked his lower lip between her teeth and began to nibble and playfully tug.

He arched up under her. Then she let go of him.

She withdrew completely, not touching him at all. "Say yes," she commanded.

Dean collapsed. "No," he mumbled, and then, "Don't stop."

Her hand whipped down. Pain blazed across his cheek. "I lowered myself to touch you, I made myself filthy, and you--"

Because he was an idiot, he kept shaking his head at her but his mouth went on talking: "Lady, this can't make you filthy--"

The cupid slapped him again and this time he was flung sideways, the bed bouncing, the zip-tie at his left wrist cutting the skin open. She said, "You'll say yes."

"I won't."

"You will," she said.

Dean lay flexing his cut wrist, still a little light-headed from the loss of touch, frowning after her as she marched toward the door.

The orgy sounds from just outside hadn't stopped, all this time. He'd been distantly aware of them throughout. Rhythmic thumping, little cries and mewls, along with faint music on a one-twelve beat--some kind of idiot dance pop. Maybe they were all hopped on Cupid Arrow highs? Probably. The cupid opened the door and the music came rolling through, oh yeah that was synth pop. Dean spotted a wide open room, the combined entertaining and dance area of a big old mansion maybe, or something modified … interesting, he'd pegged this bedroom as being on the second floor, but now he changed his mind, this was the ground floor and that made escaping even simpler, hopefully, might even be nothing beyond those windows except a porch … and look, naked flesh. Lots of it. His eyes widened.

Lots of people, not just naked on mattresses either, but some of 'em close-dancing at the far end of the big room, or just sitting around eating off paper plates, and also passing smokes around, hand-rolled ones: all that crowded into the narrow slice of view Dean had. The people making love on the mattresses were now sitting up and shrugging on clothing, and having a coffee break. Other people passed them plates of food. A passel of kids swarmed in from somewhere and fell upon the food too, in full cry. The adults laughed at them.

Dean was beginning to feel dizzy, as if caught in a dream; nothing made actual sense. So … this wasn't an orgy in some kind of adults-only getaway, then? It was an orgy in a free-love commune instead. With children. Happy families all together. And how much therapy did Dean need, if that happened to push even more of his buttons?

He was seriously messed up. He slumped on the bed and thought of a few more choice things to do to the cupid. Angel blades and holy oil weren't enough anymore. He wanted every wing-feather plucked.

Her Grace, luckily, wasn't paying attention to him anymore. She pointed toward the party scene. "They'll all die if you don't say yes. Say yes."

"No."

"Elizabeth," the cupid called.

"Here I am." A woman slipped through the doorway, doing up the final buttons on her loose sun-dress. She had wide, honest eyes, and a look of adoration for Her Grace the cupid, whose name Dean realized he didn't know. "You need me?" 

Her Grace the cupid nodded, and whispered in the woman's ear. "Can you do that? It's hard, I know."

The woman's wide-eyed candid gaze became less adoring and more troubled. "What about Emily? She'll be alone."

"She'll have me, always. I'll care for her. And when the time comes, she and I will be one. Well?"

"Of course I will," Elizabeth said. She sat on the bed and smiled at Dean.

Dean braced himself.

Was this going to be the crazy seduction part two?

"Hello, Dean. I'm Elizabeth. Our lady says you want to run away." Elizabeth looked very calm and very determined. "Don't. If you do, I'll kill myself. My little Emily will be an orphan. And it'll be your fault."

"Dean." The cupid turned back toward him and he saw that her smooth skin was beginning to show sudden blotches, across her chin and neck, and her half-exposed shoulders and arms too. Raddled marks. They spread as Dean stared, opening in pinpricks of weeping corruption. Her vessel was failing. She spread her arms, showing him how fast it was happening: the dying mortal body, the celestial being beginning to shine through in rays of blue light. "Say yes," she ordered, "and save this vessel."

Whatever happens it's not my fault, it's Her Grace's, Dean told himself fiercely, and he snarled at the cupid.

The cupid said, "I will come back wearing someone you can't say no to."

The door closed behind her. Elizabeth beamed at Dean. He shut his eyes and began to pray.

****

#

****

Castiel, angel of Thursday, was driving down a back road south of Albany, New York. When he heard Dean's prayer, he pulled his shabby truck off to the verge. His hands clenched into fists on the steering-wheel; he ground his teeth and tried somehow to reply … to send back some kind of message, so Dean wouldn't feel alone. That was what he always hated about prayers from the Winchesters: that angels could hear, but never reply.

The prayer ended. Castiel sat snarling by the roadside for a while. Then he pulled out his phone and called Sam.

****

#

****

"Cupids are a thing?" Mary asked.

Every time she thought she had a handle on the world these days, some new weirdness reared up and smacked her in the face. There were angels, there were archangels, the literal devil had risen from hell and tried to end the world, there were so many demons running around that every hunter nowadays could recite three different exorcisms from memory, it was all too much. And now cupids, and from the look on Sam's face, she wasn't allowed to burst out laughing. Cupids?

"How could that possibly be dangerous?" she asked.

Sam's mouth shut tight and he looked even unhappier.

"I'm with Mary," Flo said. She had a flask; she tilted it to her mouth and then held it out. Mary took it and drank a slug. Jim Beam, from the afterburn. Flo said, "Sounds like a bad joke. What will they do to your Dean, find a nice girl and match 'em up? June wedding? Sorry, Christina."

"It's not a cupid," Christina muttered. "Do cupids kill people? It's not some stupid cupid."

They had driven east, across the Pine Barrens, clear to the other side of the state, to route 55. It wasn't any less desolate than the Pine Barrens, but it was a suburban desolation: fields and barns and farmhouses and empty highways just like every other urban fringe in the continental USA. Just the place for drunk high-school grads to drive breakneck on the back roads, racing each other, and make up ghost stories about women in white.

Right around here, on moonless nights, a girl in a white dress waved down truckers and midnight drivers, begging for a lift. What happened afterward, if they pulled over and let her in, was unclear. There were a lot of conflicting stories. Someone had posted a video online; Mary had just watched it on her phone. It looked fake.

She didn't see a connection, anyway. Women in white, cupids, and people going up in flames. A diamond left in the soot of an immolated corpse. What did any of these things have in common?

Her instincts told her if she could figure that out, she'd know what to do next.

"Cupids are a thing," Sam confirmed. "I've met one. It wasn't pleasant." He didn't seem to want to look at Mary. "Castiel knows a lot more about them. He'll bring us up to speed when he gets here."

"That's your pet angel friend," Flo said, eyebrows going up. "Right? We've heard stories." She drawled the word. "Storr-ies."

Sam kicked a rock, not replying.

The night's last few stars shone down on them. They'd driven past the route sign, pulled off about a quarter-mile past on a gravel side road where the girls' trailer and Sam and Mary's cars wouldn't be too visible from the highway, and walked back in the dark, with the stars above. That had been about three hours ago by Mary's wrist-watch. It was a moonless night. They'd gone over this whole stretch of highway with a EMF detector, but found nothing. Sam and Mary had driven up and down several times. They hadn't seen any other cars go by, and they certainly hadn't seen any women in white. In fact, they'd found nothing. Nothing. Sam's theory--that they'd find the cupid, and follow it to wherever it had Dean--seemed to be, well, worthless.

Mary knew she wasn't an authority on angels, but she did know women in white. She chewed her lower lip, going through the lore in her head. No help there. Christina paced and ground her teeth in the dark, and Flo watched her and sniped flippant comments at Sam; she seemed to have some kind of bad feeling about Winchesters. Even now, as Sam strode off muttering toward the Route 55 sign, Flo moved close to Mary and said, "Never knew the Winchester brothers had a Campbell for a mother. How'd that happen? Every fool who hunts knows John Winchester's tale, how he was an innocent until his wife died, and that set him on the hunting way. With his little boy Dean and the other boy nobody ever got to go near. That would be this strapping lad Sammy. But you--you were John's wife then? A Campbell.

"And I died," Mary confirmed quietly.

"Well, death holds on to hunters lightly. That much I understand. You came back. But which branch of the family are you, then?"

"My mother was Deanna." It was a common Campbell name. Poor dead DeeDee was doubtless also a Deanna. "She married her third cousin Samuel. They lived in Lawrence, Kansas."

"Samuel Campbell, of the Kansas Campbells," Flo muttered. "Oh, that one. He came back too, y'know--"

"Back from the grave a few years ago, yes, I know." Her sons had told her about it, undoubtedly a highly edited version; Mary could read between the lines as well as anyone else. "He died again too, my boys say."

"Took a good few of the younger generation Campbells along with him before he did, brave hunters I was raised with and knew and liked," Flo said. "So let me tell you, I know things too, about your boys. Sam and Dean Winchester, yeah, you've been away a good long time I'm guessing … there's things you don't know about 'em, I think. I can tell you a lot."

"My sons saved the world," Mary said sharply.

"There's bad talk about 'em." Flo's voice was very low now. She was looking covertly in Sam's direction. "Don't separate the Winchester boys, that's what hunters say. They'll burn down any door keeps them apart. Gutshoot any man who gets between them. What they feel ain't natural."

Something went _click_ in Mary's mind.

Up to that moment she'd been so furious that she could have spat nails at Flo. Now all that anger had vanished. She remembered the people she'd interviewed, the families of the victims, how they'd all said one thing the same but she hadn't attached any importance to it at the time. Mary called over to Sam: "Sam! Do something for me?"

Loving hearts. The spontaneous combustion victims had all left mourning families behind them. They'd been loved, honestly loved; they must have had loving hearts … Had the monster taken Dean because he had a loving heart? Had that made him irresistible?

Mary didn't know much about her sons, those strangers, but she knew that when they loved, it was deeply and completely. Both of them.

She told Sam, "Get in the Impala and drive the road, but do it by yourself this time--no one else in the car. And be ready."

****

#

****

Not long until dawn. They didn't have time for more than one shot at this tonight. Better make it count.

"Smart move, cousin," Flo said in Mary's ear as they settled into concealment near the route marker. Christina was on Mary's other side, glaring. "Are those angel-blades?"

"Mmm-hm. Sweet and shiny." 

Mary knew better than to bother with a gun tonight. Guns didn't do squat against angels. What she had was a pair of angel-blades from the Impala trunk, that treasure trove of weaponry. She'd already flipped one several times to get the heft, and then hurled it fifty feet to sink deep in the trunk of a pine tree: _thunk_. She'd been throwing knives since she was twelve. She could put this one down the spout of a beer bottle if that was where it needed to go.

"Good stuff," Flo said. "When that woman in white shows, straight through the heart, huh?"

"No." Mary kept her voice even. "Just off target, if we need to make her jump sideways. Then light the holy oil." They'd drawn a circle big enough to encompass thirty feet of highway, right around the route marker. It was a long-chance plan, but that was better than no plan at all. "We need to question her, not kill her."

"No, we have to nail that monster!" Christina said. "We'll only get one try!"

"We're going to question her first. We can still kill her afterward. After we get Dean back--"

"No, we've got to kill her straight off!"

Good thing that Christina didn't have any angel-effective weapons, Mary thought. She looked around in time to see Flo making curt gestures at Christina, and Christina scowling and then looking down and sticking her hands in her pockets. Christina kicked the ground, and Flo said, "Yeah, smart tactics, Mary. Sending away the boy, too, that's good. Gives us privacy to go on with our heart-to-heart."

"I'm not interested in your fifth-hand gossip," Mary said. "Can we be professional about this?"

"So set us straight then. Are they both screwing the angel, like people say?"

"What?" said Mary, not believing her ears.

"You heard me. Both of 'em? Or is it just your eldest who's into wings?"

It was enough. Mary turned and threw a punch straight at Flo's grinning face.

The devastating pain hit her between the shoulder blades. Mary convulsed and went down, screaming curses at herself inside her mind as she did; the angel blade in her hand tumbled out of reach, and she lay on her back juddering with shock. Dew-wet grass under the back of her neck, and nothing she could do except ride through the agony. The two Campbell women stood over her, looking down; they seemed very tall and far away. "Get her weapons," Flo ordered.

Christina bent, stowing away a small box which was a taser, and expertly frisked Mary. "Not just the angel-blades," she reported, "she's got some fancy-ass knuckledusters, and more stuff too. Old Tom will love us--more toys for his collection."

"I don't intend to give 'em up to Old Tom," Flo said. "Those brass knuckles have Enochian on them. I think we'll keep them for ourselves. Even after we've avenged Deedee."

"Deedee," Christina breathed. Her face was alight.

"Now get to it. Time's short and we've got work."

Christina jabbed the taser straight down at Mary's chest and the world went black.

****

#

****

Sam drove down the highway.

He had an angel-blade on his lap, and a pair of Enochian handcuffs on the bench seat at his right hand, close enough to grab in a hurry. They were archangel-strong, so they ought to do for a cupid. He hoped he'd get the chance to use them.

A light shone blue on the road ahead.

He saw a woman waiting.

  
  
  



End file.
